Month: April 2026

Serenity as Swan Song

I have written here more than once about the value of projects in old age.  Simone de Beauvoir says pursuing a project is essential.  Some people have long term projects that they continue to pursue (thinking of my husband and his study of Greek), while others are encouraged to learn a language or new instrument.

In a published dialogue, Jorges Borges talks a little about his own project for old age.  At the time, he was about to turn 85 and just a couple of years from his death.  He says that he used to want to be a “fascinating tragic character but not anymore”:

I resign myself to not being interesting, to being insipid, but also on being serene or trying to be serene which is no less important.  Serenity is something to aspire to always. Perhaps we do not attain it completely but it’s easier to attain in old age rather than youth.  And serenity is the greatest good.  That is not my original idea – the Epicureans and the Stoics thought that there were no original ideas.  But, why not emulate those illustrious Greeks?  What more could we want?

Various cultures have held out the idea of serenity in old age.  Elderly Buddhists have a practice called “going forth” as sannyasin, holy old beggars.  In the Middle Ages, older people often retired to convents or monasteries to find God before they died.  One might remember Queen Guinevere retiring to the convent after the death of Arthur, to “repent and find God.”  In our culture, the ideal of serenity has been crowded out by bucket lists, senior activity centers, “educational” cruises, and exhortations for the old to keep busy in any number of ways.

For some reason this notion of serenity in old age got me thinking about the trope of the “swan song.”  It shows up in Ovid, Aesop, Aeschylus and Plato, who has Socrates say this as he is about to face his death: “You seem to think me inferior to the swans in prophecy. They sing before too, but when they realize that they must die they sing most and most beautifully.”  Biologists tell us that this is not true, but it shows up again and again, and is a phrase still much in current use to describe the last performance of an actor or singer, or the last speech of a politician.

One of the most famous madrigals of the Renaissance was “The Silver Swan” by Orlando Gibbons:

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
“Farewell, all joys; O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.”

The last line makes it perfect for our time.  There has been much discussion about whether the song is a song of joy or of resignation.  I would hope that it was both – joy in the life and resignation to the reality of old age and death.  But, that brings us back to serenity.

Science tells us that the swan song is a myth and not based in any kind of reality.  There is also disagreement about whether the swan sings so sweetly because it is about to shrug off the challenges of life or because life has been so good.  I would like to think that the swan sings because it has finally discovered that serenity is the answer to life and to death.  As worries are about to vanish, our swan wonders why he had ever worried.

This brings me to one of my favorite Schopenhauer passages:

There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error… the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence… hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment.

Schopenhauer can be a depressing old coot, but he points out why we should look for serenity instead of happiness.  Serenity involves renouncing happiness in favor of acceptance.  And serenity is defined as the state of being “calm, peaceful, and untroubled.”  Tranquillity is also “a peaceful, calm state,” but it is “without noise, violence, worry.”  Tranquillity is the absence of trouble; serenity is not letting trouble bother us.  I cannot remake the world so that it is tranquil, but I can live in the world in a state of serenity.  Or so I hope.

I have always craved serenity, peace.  Who hasn’t?  I have written many stories where the characters find a level of peace.  Once upon a time stories.  I want it for real.  If you want to read a story about old age projects in search of serenity you might look at “A Spoonful of Sugar” or “Again and Again and Again.”  But in these stories, the search is oblique.  I want something more direct.

So that is my major project for the next segment of my old age.  I will still write here, practice piano, go to French classes, and try to get enough exercise.  But above all, I want to find serenity.  And perhaps renounce the avoidable things that steal it away.  I’ll give you progress reports.

 

“When Will They (We) Ever Learn?”

In these dark days, when the moral compass of this country has gone amok, I keep remembering the words of a hero of my hippy days.  “When will they ever learn?” was the chorus of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a song recorded by everyone from Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, with the most iconic version being that of Peter, Paul and Mary.

And now my generation is in charge (although some of them should have long since segued into assisted living) and, clearly, we have never learned.  We were angry in the 1960s, but we were also hopeful.  I am no longer hopeful.  It is our generation that comprises Fox News’ largest audience segment, with the median viewing age being in their late 60s.  An impressive majority of those over 65 voted for Trump.  When will we ever learn?  And here we go – blundering into Iran, killing people and bulldozing flowers, while the entire world holds its breath and hopes there are not radioactive repercussions in addition to the disastrous economic impacts.

Seeger’s question can be looked at in two ways.  We could refer to each individual one of us.  We have all had the experience of watching someone in our lives make the same mistake (the friend who marries the same kind of man) over and over again. We do it ourselves.  We say, after the fact, that we should have known better – and yet.

But the we is also collective.  Our country has made the same mistakes over and over again.  Viet Nam apparently didn’t teach us anything; nor did the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Despite extensive postmortems after these initiatives… we do it again.  Off we march with optimistic hopes to spread democracy and make the world safer for mankind.  But there is no democracy and the world is less and less safe.  And we kill our own as well as theirs – the difference is that they kill our soldiers, while we kill men, women, children – whoever is in our way.  And now we are saying that even the most rudimentary (and humane) rules of war do not apply to us.

S. Eliot wrote a wonderful play about the death of Thomas Becket called Death in the Cathedral. In a key moment, as his death approaches, we get these lines from Beckett:

We do not know very much of the future

Except that from generation to generation

The same things happen again and again.

Men learn little from others’ experience.

But in the life of one man, never

The same time returns.  Sever

The cord, shed the scale.  Only

The fool, fixed in his folly, may think

He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

“Men learn little from others’ experience.”  A depressingly true statement.

And then there are the last lines, which seem to sum up the whole problem: “The fool, fixed in his folly, may think he can turn the wheels on which he turns.”  It seems to me that we have become more and more foolish.  Washington thinks it can fix our problems by killing people.  Silicon Valley thinks they can overcome aging and death.  And here we sit as children are bombed, people die for lack of health insurance, and innocent children go to detention camps.

One more example.  Scientists have had a pretty good idea that global warming was happening and what was causing it since at least 1938 when Guy Callendar assembled statistics going back into the 19th century.  And even if we didn’t believe in global warming, we knew that the availability of oil and gas was a disruptive factor, particularly when the gas shortages of the 1970s (1973 kicked off by an Arab embargo after the Yom Kippur war, and 1979 set off by the Iranian Revolution) Our generation sat in line for enough fuel to at least get us to work. (We were hippies no longer.)  There was much talk about alternative energy sources at that point – over 40 years ago!  Clearly no lessons were learned.  And the planet, indeed, has suffered.  Where have all the flowers gone?

Our generation did learn some things.  We stopped smoking, we learned to use a PC (and a cell phone, a tablet, and a smart TV).  We learned how to support ourselves (more or less), and we learned to exercise – and we learned that a little discipline is not always a bad thing.  But we didn’t learn how to stop wars, greed, and amoral leadership.

In her book about aging (The Last Gift of Time), Carolyn Heilbrun suggests that the young can learn little from the old, but the old can learn from the young.  I am not ready to learn from Generation Z, but maybe we could all profit from learning from our younger selves.  We thought we could change things.  Perhaps we need to tap into our long-gone hippie selves and see what is left of a generation that genuinely thought that the answer to “when will we ever learn?” was “when our generation is in charge.”  Oh, the pity!  And surely our generation is in charge.  Old people rule our country, elders who have not gotten wise like the ancient Yoda, but only wrinkled and bald like him.  (Of course, Yoda had 900 years to learn what he knew, a luxury of time neither we nor our planet has.)

As Eliot has the chorus say at the end of Murder in the Cathedral, “Lord, have mercy on us.”